Boston Ballet celebrates Jerome Robbins with 'Genius at Play'

By Iris Fanger, Correspondent

Friday

Sep 7, 2018 at 4:28 PMSep 10, 2018 at 2:34 PM

Boston Ballet opened its 2018-2019 season Thursday with “Genius at Play,” a program of three works by Jerome Robbins that celebrates the choreographer’s 100th birthday next month and reminds us of his extraordinary talents.

BOSTON - Boston Ballet opened its 2018-2019 season Thursday with “Genius at Play,” a program of three works by Jerome Robbins that celebrates the choreographer’s 100th birthday next month and reminds us of his extraordinary talents.

Robbins was one of the first of the American-born choreographers to emerge into mid-20th-century ballet, at the time generally dominated by Russian and British men. Robbins made a memorable debut in 1944 with “Fancy Free,” combining a superb understanding of the merging of technique to music as if inevitable, a brash rummaging through other dance styles and the recklessness of youth, plus a sense of humor.

Boston Ballet has rightly centered the program with “Fancy Free,” which has been in the repertory with various casts. However, this trio of sailors - Patric Palkens, Isaac Akiba,and Paul Craig - were pitch-perfect in their roles, matched for sauciness and a go-for-broke manner of dancing by the two women they were chasing, Maria Alvarez and Kathleen Breen Combes. “Fancy Free,” set on a New York street corner under a street lamp and next to the Edward Hopper-like bar designed by Oliver Smith, tells the story of three sailor-pals on a 24-hour leave in the big city. That they are out for a bunch of beers and some girlfriends is understood, as is their easy camaraderie, mock aggressiveness and competition. If you were seated in the theater the night of the 1944 New York premiere by Ballet Theatre, you could have walked out onto the street and seen servicemen like Robbins’ characters.

Although “West Side Story” was years in the future, the ballet marked the beginning of the collaborations between Robbins and composer Leonard Bernstein, both 25 at the time and on the cusp of fame. “Fancy Free” also established Robbins’ ability to present a drama in dance. He gave each of the characters his (or her) own personality and added little bits of reality to the mix, such as the casual sharing of a package of gum, and the succulent solos for each of the sailors that anchor the work. The tender pas de deux for Paul Craig and the lustrous Kathleen Breen Combes, the veteran principal dancer who knows a lot about story-telling herself, was one of the highlights of this revival.

After a spirited orchestral opening of Bernstein’s “Overture from ‘Candide,” in honor of the composer’s centennial, a group of street kids took the stage for “Interplay” (music by Morton Gould), the next ballet Robbins created after “Fancy Free.” The work is an abstract, jazzy piece about eight friends at play in the high school yard, where they show off their smarts in ballet, but also their wiggles and casual sense of community. Patrick Yocum partnered Seo Hye Han, who delivered a lush and lovely performance as a young girl tentatively trying out romance, with no sexual overtones.

The program ended with “ Glass Pieces,” a work bridging 39 productive years in Robbins’ career that included outsized hits on Broadway such as “West Side Story,” “Gypsy” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” and his appointment at New York City Ballet as co-ballet master with George Balanchine. The world had indeed turned and a new minimalist style was being explored by experimental choreographers like Lucinda Childs, and composers such as Philip Glass. Melody was integrated with repetition, interrupted by only minute variations, mirrored by dance patterns that mimicked everyday movements. Robbins took to the change with curiosity and a freshness, despite the difference in tone from his earlier works.

“Glass Pieces” is a combination of three Glass compositions: “Rubric” and “Facades” from “Glassworks” and the Funeral Music from the Glass opera, “Akhnaten.” The whole is a fascinating look at society as a tribe and its rituals, starting with the entire cast, dressed in ordinary clothes, entering and leaving the stage as if sauntering through an urban crossroads. Gradually, three couples emerge to do small but telling movement phrases and then sink back into anonymity. The second section, “Facades,” finds the tribe in a hypnotic ritual: 16 women in silhouette crossing the rear of a darkened stage with only tiny changes of gesture. They are fronted by the exquisite Lia Cirio, partnered by Paulo Arrais, in movements that might have been carved off a wall of ancient Mayan ruins. The finale,” Akhnaten,” is a lively piece for the large cast: a dozen men in military, sharp lined formations, in contrast to a dozen women moving in more curved stage patterns. The entire work proved mesmerizing.

A shout-out to conductor Beatrice Jona Affron and the Boston Ballet orchestra is warranted for handling so well three such different - and demanding - pieces of music.

Boston Ballet has done its fans a service by presenting these Robbins pieces, but they are by no means his only ballets worth staging. Could “Dances At A Gathering” be next on the list? Meanwhile, the company goes back to the studio after Sept. 16, while “Hamilton” raps the Opera House for two months. Watch for the BB’s late November return in “The Nutcracker.”